Organisational volunteering: Meanings of volunteering, professionalism, volunteer communities of practice and wellbeing

Volunteering has become the major means by which individuals and communities connect and engage with significant social issues. While volunteering is typically constructed as an inherently positive activity that improves personal and social wellbeing, this project critically examines the relationship between organisational volunteering and wellbeing. Scholarly literature from multiple disciplines suggests that three key dimensions are particularly salient in understanding connections between volunteering and wellbeing. The first dimension is the significance and meaning that volunteers themselves attach to what they do. The extensive volunteering literature contains multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives on the core features of organisational volunteering, without considering how volunteers themselves might reconcile these tensions. The second dimension is the role that organisational expectations and messages about professionalism in particular play in shaping volunteer identity and practice and its relationship with wellbeing. Professionalism is usually framed as an attribute of paid work and hence as inconsistent with the volunteer role and the mission of nonprofit organisations more generally. The third dimension involves the connections between organisational volunteering and wellbeing as they are evident in nonprofit communities of practice, where wellbeing emerges from the collaborative relationships that volunteers develop. CoP scholarship tends to position collaboration as a component of “good” CoPs and conflict as negative. Accordingly, the objective of the thesis is to understand the meanings of volunteering as they are constructed by volunteers, shaped by understandings of professionalism embedded in core organisational codes of conduct, and enacted in communities of practice. Doing so will enable a close and comprehensive assessment of the connections and potential tensions between volunteering and wellbeing. In addition to advancing research on volunteering, the research has implications for three core organisational communication constructs: occupational and organisational identity, coordination and relationality. The study of the meanings, identities and practice of volunteering offers insight into how individuals manage multiple identity positions, especially in non-work settings, and how particular identities cue the ways in which relationality is enacted. The study of communities of practice in nonprofit contexts could also extend studies of coordination that explore how organisations attempt to control their members by focusing on meaningful participation. The thesis is structured around five research questions. First, I ask: what meanings do individuals engaged with voluntary organisations give to their volunteering? Second, in order to assess the impact of professionalism, I ask three questions: How do organisational codes of conduct construct professionalism for volunteers? How do these codes of conduct position the relationship between professionalism and wellbeing? How do volunteers relate organisational notions of professionalism to their own wellbeing? Finally, in order to understand the connections between organisational volunteering, relationships and wellbeing in practice, I ask: How do volunteers enact communities of practice? As a broad frame for the entire project, I employ a hybrid phenomenological perspective based around three key postulates: (1) individuals create meaning through intentional interaction with objects of experience; (2) we use both experience and context to understand a phenomenon; and (3) individual and group differences in how an object is experienced enrich our understanding of a phenomenon. The postulates suggest that, in order to understand the phenomenon of organisational volunteering, both a detailed account of volunteers’ experiences and an analysis of the organisational context in which volunteering occurs is required. Specifically, I analysed volunteering in three nonprofit organisations in New Zealand: Refugee Services, the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society, and St John Ambulance. A total of 49 in-depth interviews were conducted with volunteers in all three organisations in order to answer questions about the meanings of volunteering, the impact of professionalism on wellbeing, and communities of practice. Additionally, I collected textual data in the form of reports, brochures, promotional materials and training manuals, as well as observational data to assess how codes of professional conduct were constructed in each organisation. Data were analysed for each of the three key dimensions of the volunteering-wellbeing relationship as follows. I used a phenomenological method of analysis adapted from the Duquesne School to unpack the meanings that volunteers gave to their experiences of volunteering. In order to develop emic understandings of professionalism within the nonprofit organisations in this study, I highlighted statements from organisational representatives and in organisational texts that discussed professionalism and clustered key elements into themes. In contrast, I applied an a priori coding method to address the last research question on communities of practice. Specifically, I adopted Lave and Wenger’s (1991) framework to analyse how volunteers used shared repertoire, mutual interaction and joint enterprise to create communities of practice, and I parsed these categories for evidence of both collaboration and conflict. The findings of this project have significant implications for research on volunteering. First, this study challenges uni-dimensional visions of volunteering found in both academic and popular literature as a free act. Instead, the data highlights the dual nature of volunteering, which is simultaneously agentic and deeply relational. Moreover, two distinct pathways, or ways of negotiating this duality, emerge. Volunteers on the freedom-reciprocity pathway move synchronically between agency and relationality, while those on the giving-obligation pathway shift diachronically from agency to relationality. Second, the study shows that codes of conduct regarding professionalism and its relationship with wellbeing are constructed differently across organisations. Further, participants in each organisation diverged in their responses to organisational notions of professionalism. One group enjoyed the structure and control afforded by professional standards, while the other group resisted professionalism as impersonal and negative for their wellbeing. Third, contestation and conflict were as prevalent as collaboration and cooperation in volunteer communities of practice in all three organisations. While it was clear that dissent was an important part of “well” volunteer communities, the expectation that volunteering would lead to wellbeing and collaborative relationships did influence volunteer retention and intentions to exit. These findings have implications for organisational communication research on identity, coordination and relationality, as well as theorising on nonprofit organising, in the form of three dialectical tensions. First, the study suggests that the process of identification is dynamic and dependent upon how volunteers manage the duality between agency and relationality inherent in volunteering. Second, the study offers an expansive view of what “collaborative” behaviour in communities of practice might entail, implicating both consensus and dissensus. Finally, the study demonstrates the key role that relationality plays, both in definitions of occupational identity as well as the construction of collaborative communities of practice

Volunteering and professionalization: Trends in tension?

The last several decades have witnessed the proliferation and popularity of volunteering both as a means for individuals to connect with social issues and as a way of sustaining nonprofit organizations; indeed, it dominates contemporary discussions about civic engagement. Whereas some social theorists have promoted volunteering as a benchmark to assess democratic participation, civic-mindedness, social capital, and trust (Putnam, 2000), others have questioned the uncomplicated associations among volunteering, civic engagement, and community (Ganesh & McAllum, 2009). Like Snyder (2001), we position volunteering as a “hybrid strain of helping” (p. 16309) that falls between spontaneous bystander intervention and highly obligated caregiving. Specifically, we propose that volunteering involves sustained identity investments by volunteers performed and realized in organizational settings

The positive impact of othering in voluntourism: The role of the relational other in becoming another self

<p>Despite initial enthusiasm about the potential of voluntourism to promote sustainable development and intercultural learning, recent critiques have focused on voluntourists’ tendency to reinforce status differences by “Othering” their hosts. This study expands the literature on Othering in international voluntourism contexts by examining how local community members who interacted with voluntourists interpreted the Self–Other relationship. Based on longitudinal focus group data from four host communities, the findings showed that the categories of “Self” and “Other” were not fixed but fluid, permeable, and dynamic. The study suggests that the Othering process can open up unexpected relational spaces and reconfigure community–voluntourist relationships.</p

A comparative tale of two methods : how thematic and narrative analyses author the data story differently

An interpretive qualitative approach insists on the plural and negotiated nature of the meanings that humans attach to their social realities. Thus, the qualitative researcher must navigate multiple and sometimes conflicting commitments to method, data, oneself, participants, and one’s reader. This can lead us to obscure the messiness of data analysis in final research reports and to downplay how methodological choices can make our participants ‘say things.’ In this article, we compare two interpretive methods, thematic and narrative analysis, including their shared epistemological and ontological premises, and offer a pedagogical demonstration of their application to the same data excerpt. However, our broader goal is to use the divergent results to critically examine how our choice of analytic method in interpretive research influences how we (researcher + method) ‘author’ data stories. Ultimately, researcher reflexivity must go beyond acknowledging how one’s position may influence the data analysis or the participant

“I only tell them the good parts:” How relational others influence paid careworkers’ descriptions of their work as meaningful

The occupational images associated with paid care work for older adults range from a job carried out by earthly angels to a form of stigmatized dirty work: This ambiguity makes maintaining a committed long-term care workforce challenging. Encouraging careworkers to view their work as meaningful has been touted as a potential solution. Moving beyond a purely subjective approach to meaningfulness, we explore how careworkers construe their work as meaningful and how relational others influence careworkers’ ability to speak about meaningfulness. Others’ messages matter, although their importance depends on relational others’ knowledge of care tasks and involvement in the care relationship. By documenting how others’ accounts both enhance and compromise careworkers’ ability to speak about meaningfulness and moments of meaninglessness, our study identifies sources of meaningfulness for careworkers, a socially essential workforce under-examined by meaningful work research, and extends meaningful work research in contexts where relationships are central to occupational identity

Well-being as discourse: Potentials and problems for studies of organizing and health inequalities

The sustained global popularity, prevalence, and influence of the term wellbeing are manifest in the definition of health offered by the World Health Organization since 1948: “A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not only the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1948, p. 1). The discursive convergence of the terms health and well-being is echoed in myriad health policies across the world; for instance, in Aotearoa New Zealand, hauora has been understood as both health and well-being, viewed as a whare tapa wha or four-sided house built on spiritual, physical, family, and emotional/mental dimensions (National Health Committee, New Zealand, 1998). The convergence of health and wellbeing can also be seen in an increasing number of health campaigns: A reproductive health campaign in Honduras claims, “Salud Reproductiva, bienestar y vida!” [Reproductive health is well-being and life]. The convergence can also be seen in the slogan and vision of an increasingly large number of health organizations. For instance, the home page of one public health organization states that it is “a membership organization that works to improve the level of health and well-being for all Arizonans through advocacy, education and professional development” (Arizona Public Health Association, n.d.)